The first devices for recording and reproducing
The first devices for recording and reproducing sound were mechanical in nature and could not record arbitrary sounds such as the human voice. The automatic reproduction of music can be traced back as far as the 9th century, when the Banū Mūsā brothers invented "the earliest known mechanical musical instrument", in this case a hydropower organ which played interchangeable cylinders automatically. According to Charles B. Fowler, this "cylinder with raised pins on the surface remained the basic device to produce and reproduce music mechanically until the second half of the nineteenth century. The Banu Musa brothers also invented an automatic flute player which appears to have been the first programmable machine. According to Charles B. Fowler, the automata were a robot band which performed "more than fifty facial and body actions during each musical selection." In the 14th century, Flanders introduced a mechanical bell-ringer controlled by a rotating cylinder. Similar designs appeared in barrel organs (15th century), musical clocks (1598), barrel pianos (1805), and musical boxes (1815). All of these machines could play stored music, but they could not play arbitrary sounds, could not record a live performance, and were limited by the physical size of the medium. In 1796, a Swiss watchmaker named Antoine Favre-Salomon described his idea for what we now call the cylinder musical box. This can be considered an early method of recording a melody, although it does not record an arbitrary sound and does not record automatically. "Playback" however is automatic. The fairground organ, developed in 1892, used a similar system of accordion-folded punched cardboard books. The player piano, first demonstrated in 1876, used a punched paper scroll that could store an arbitrarily long piece of music. The most sophisticated of the piano rolls were "hand-played", meaning that the roll represented the actual performance of an individual, not just a transcription of the sheet music. This technology to record a live performance onto a piano roll was not developed until 1904. Piano rolls have been in continuous mass production since around 1898. A 1908 U.S. Supreme Court copyright case noted that, in 1902 alone, there were between 70,000 and 75,000 player pianos manufactured, and between 1,000,000 and 1,500,000 piano rolls produced. The use of piano rolls began to decline in the 1920s although one type is still being made today. This 1860 phonautogram by Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville is the first known sound recording with a human voice. The first device that could record sound mechanically (but could not play it back) was the phonautograph, developed in 1857 by Parisian inventor Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville. The earliest known recordings of the human voice were phonautograms also made in 1857. These earliest known recordings include a dramatic reading in French of Shakespeare's Othello and music played on a guitar and trumpet. The recordings consist of groups of wavy lines scratched by a stylus onto fragile paper that was blackened by the soot from an oil lamp. One of his phonautograms of Au Clair de la Lune, a French folk song, was digitally converted to sound in 2008